LUMBERYARDS

Early lumberyards in the Great Plains not only
shaped the development of that region but
also affected the Great Lakes region and railroad
practices. As settlers in the last half of the
nineteenth century moved west onto the generally
treeless Plains, they sought familiar
building materials at lumberyards. During the
same period, the pine forests of the Great
Lakes region were being rapidly harvested,
providing the timber for sale at those yards.
Indeed, Great Lakes lumber supplied much of
the growing market in the Great Plains, with
transportation enabled by a rail network that
was expanding west from Chicago and other
midwestern cities.

A relationship between railroads and lumber
retailers was necessary, since timber usually
was sold through "line yards"–multiple
facilities owned by various companies and located
in towns along a railroad line. But it was
an often tenuous association. In general, the
preferred site for a lumberyard in a Plains
town was on a warehouse lot adjacent to the
railroad. Due to their proximity to the tracks,
these locations were easy to stock. They also
often had good visibility, which helped to generate
tra.c. However, since those parcels were
usually on railroad property, the railroad
made the warehouse lot assignments to its
best advantage, which often relegated lumber
companies to less desirable situations. It was
left to Gen. Grenville Dodge, Civil War veteran
and engineer in charge of the Union Pacific's
late 1860s push across the Plains to Promontory
Point, Utah, to argue that lumber
and railroad companies should work as partners,
because lumber was among those commodities
that could attract settlers to a town
and thus help generate tra.c for a railroad.

Once the site for a yard had been agreed
upon (preferably a site without standing water),
a stock of lumber was delivered and made
available for sale. Until a company was sure
that a town's potential for settlement merited
investment, initial lumber sales generally occurred
without the convenience of an office or
lumber shed. If the early sales were satisfactory,
a company might construct a small
structure, perhaps no bigger than sixteen feet
by twenty-four feet and including only a modest
office and shed for the finished lumber. If
sales did not develop properly, the company
could easily load its stock onto a train and
move to the next town, losing virtually nothing
in the process.

Aside from an office and shed, lumberyards
in early Plains towns included a limehouse
and lumber piles. Sometimes yard expansion
was warranted, and an addition was made to
the extant office-and-shed combination. For
instance, the sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot
structure could be extended to forty feet in
length, thus allowing more lumber storage
space. The investment a company was willing
to make in a yard was commensurate with the
perceived potential for lumber sales. Accordingly,
larger towns received more substantial
yards, which generally included multiple storage
sheds, the largest of which could accommodate
wagons.

Lumberyards were places at which a significant
commodity passed from supplier to consumer.
Moreover, they played an important
role in the processes that ultimately created
the Great Lakes cutover region as well as in the
establishment of the early European American
built environments in the Great Plains. Despite
these extensive effects, the companies
that operated the yards had simple objectives:
they wanted to get into a town quickly, sell
as much lumber with as little investment possible,
and then move on to seek fortune elsewhere.